Traditionally, document management required that vast amounts of documents be shipped to storage facilities only to necessitate retrieval when needed. The result was an inordinate and unnecessary expense of both time and money. Recently, however, the cost of storing an image of a sheet of paper on digital media has become less than the cost of printing and storing the sheet of paper itself. This development has been produced by the rapid development of storage system technology.
Managing conventional digital document storage systems may present several problems. Conventional document storage systems require that a user manually scan every document on a digital scanner in order to create an image of a document that may be archived in digital storage. Consequently, in order to archive a document, a scanner must be available to the potential user. Notwithstanding the availability of a scanner, a user must remember that a document needs to be scanned in order to create an archive. In addition, the scanning process may be time consuming if it is necessary to scan thousands of document pages. Therefore, an automatic digital document management system is desired.